The headline says it all, though the recanting of video game addiction specialist Keith Bakker comes with qualifiers:
“…the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers – this is a social problem.”
…
“This gaming problem is a result of the society we live in today,” Mr Bakker told BBC News. “Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication.”
It’s easy (and very tempting) to fall back on sarcasm here, but let’s just be thankful he’s learned something and will now stop putting loner kids through some sort of twelve-step program.
Incidentally, Bakker’s findings concur with those of the National Institute of Media and the Family, which for the first year ever has used its annual MEDIAwise ‘video games score-card’ to praise the gaming industry rather than excoriate it. Times are a-changin’. [image by William Hook]
Sorry, Keith, won’t happen. What is happening in terms of bullying is a symptom of scarcifying of resources, competition for desirable sexual mates, intentionally excluding the weak from access to luxuries, resources and socializing, and base overpopulation.
It will end in the collapse of the school system – at some time in the near future a selection of parents will homeschool children by planting them behind a monitor with a testable curriculum and keeping them away from the arguably damaging influence of modern mass-schooling.
And that will produce results better than the school factories can – for a selection of the population who have money and access to good computers and software.
The school system will protest, but will be left holding the financially less secure, the bullies, the dimwitted, vain and the useless. And that will spiral down into an ever greater ghettofication. And politicians will be left trying to apply surgery on this mess holding spoons. No easy solution in sight anywhere until way after it has indeed collapsed.
I agree it is all communication. They feel peace in these games.